Other emerging technologies
Arcology - combining "architecture" and "ecology",[1] is a set of architectural design principles for enormous habitats Virgin Earth Challenge - a competition offering a $25 million prize for whoever can demonstrate a commercially viable design which results in the permanent removal of greenhouse gases out of the Earth's atmosphere, so as to contribute materially to avoid global warming. Domed city - a kind of theoretical or fictional structure that encloses a large urban area under a single roof. In most descriptions, the dome is airtight and pressurized, creating a habitat that can be controlled for air temperature, composition and quality, typically due to an external atmosphere (or lack thereof) that is inimical to habitation for one or more reasons. Force field - a barrier made up of energy or particles to protect a person, area or object from attacks or intrusions. Plasma window - a technology that fills a volume of space with plasma confined by a magnetic field. Plasma is any gas that has had some of its atoms or molecules ionized and is generally held to be a separate phase of matter. This is most commonly achieved by heating the gas to extremely high temperatures, although other methods also exist. Plasma becomes increasingly viscous (thick) at higher temperatures, to the point where other matter has trouble passing through. LED lamp - a light-emitting diode (LED) product that is assembled into a lamp (or light bulb) for use in lighting fixtures. LED lamps have a lifespan and electrical efficiency that is several times better than incandescent lamps, and significantly better than most fluorescent lamps. Magnetic refrigeration - a cooling technology based on the magnetocaloric effect. This technique can be used to attain extremely low temperatures, as well as the ranges used in common refrigerators, depending on the design of the system. Magnetorheological fluid - a type of smart fluid in a carrier fluid, usually a type of oil. When subjected to a magnetic field, the fluid greatly increases its apparent viscosity, to the point of becoming a viscoelastic solid. Possible use: armor. Synthetic biology - the design and construction of biological devices and systems.[1] It is an area of biological research and technology that combines biology and engineering, thus often overlapping with bioengineering and biomedical engineering BioBrick - One of the goals of the BioBricks project is to provide a workable approach to nanotechnology employing biological organisms. Another, more long-term goal is to produce a synthetic living organism from standard parts that are completely understood. iGEM - The International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition is a worldwide synthetic biology competition that was initially aimed at undergraduate university students, but has since expanded to include divisions for high school students and entrepreneurs. One of the aims of the competition is to attempt to build simple biological systems from standard, interchangeable parts and operate them in living cells. The iGEM competition facilitates this by providing a library of standardized parts (called BioBrick standard biological parts) to students, and asking them to design and build genetic machines with them. Student teams can also submit their own BioBricks. Successful projects produce cells that exhibit new and unusual properties by engineering sets of multiple genes together with mechanisms to regulate their expression. More see here Category:Emerging technologies Category:XXI century